Why Artists Die Young
I got a pal who wrote a really good book on the Barefoot Bandit, well researched, tautly written, humanely told. He’d hoped to parlay that into a movie with the Academy Award winning screenplay writer of Milk and J. Edgar, but something went sour beside the kidney pools of Hollywood and the movie lapsed beyond the internet interest expiration date. He’s holed up at his cabin on Orcas, doing what most of us artists do, waiting for the phone to ring.
Ten years ago I had breakfast with a local artist here on the South End. He’d just finished a huge mural at the new theater and their outside lobby of the restaurants that ringed the place. He was depressed, he said, now that the project was over. He couldn’t understand it, big artwork installed to great acclaim, good money, all good. And now he was depressed. He poked forlornly at his chicken fried steak. That project was a yearlong undertaking and he figured it would open the floodgates to more of the same. Fame and fortune would surely follow.
I gulped at my 3rd refill of coffee, set it down empty and said, “Post partum depression.” He looked at me with a mouthful of heart attack and said, “What?”
“You got the afterbirth blues,” I said with some authority. “You’ll look at the other stuff, the usual paintings, as piddly-ass. The big stuff as an adrenaline rush. When it stops, the rest seems blasé’ It’ll pass … or else you’ll get another big one.”
I just went two years in withdrawal. They don’t make methadone for this. There’s no cure. And there’s no prescription. You wait for the Next Project, cold turkey and sweating in the wee hours of the night in a blood fever.
Like I told Orcas Bob, you’d think it would get easier for us Old Hands. But it doesn’t. I like to think — when I’m partially rational — the hunger lets us keep an Edge. Too much success, we’d get fat and lazy. Probably go to socialite parties, get accustomed to the applause and the alcohol, then squiggle out the next artwork by rote and routine. Maybe we’re actually the lucky ones. You know … if that phone ever rings again.
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Tags: art ain't for sissies, ear removal for artists, Starving artists
Also, every time someone tells an artist “you have to do this for yourself, because you love it,” an angel loses her wings.
Explains why we mostly have fallen angels these days….